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Updated: June 9, 2025
Both parties now began to set in motion new political machinery. The "Gazette of the United States" became the recognized mouthpiece of the Federalists, and the "National Gazette," edited by Philip Freneau, translating clerk in Jefferson's department, began to attack Hamilton and other leading Federalists, and even the President.
When the charge was made that he had a sinister motive in procuring for Freneau a clerkship in the State Department, and in aiding him to establish a newspaper, Madison frankly related the facts in a letter to Edmund Randolph.
In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the National Gazette, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a time.
Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An old college mate of mine," said James Madison who was by tradition Freneau's roommate at Princeton in the class of 1771 "a poet and man of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world."
Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends. The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet.
"The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed upon him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the Government which was not done from the purest motives; that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since; that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world; and that they were charging him with wanting to be king; that that rascal Freneau sent him three of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers; that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him."
He came from this house and walked over to Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of The Minerva, a paper at that time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration. The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of stirring scenes and momentous events.
Even the yellow fever, which, from its novelty and its malignity, struck terror into every bosom, and was rendered more lurid by the absurd preventive means of burning tar and tar-barrels in almost every street, afforded no mitigation of party animosity; and Greenleaf with his Argus, Freneau with his Time-Piece, and Cobbett with his Porcupine Gazette, increased the consternation, which only added to the inquietude of the peaceable citizen, who had often reasoned within himself that a seven-years' carnage, through which he had passed, had been enough for one life."
For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said: "I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington a lasting reputation." It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the two were friends.
He brought Freneau over from New York to Philadelphia, he knew the sort of work that Freneau would and could do, he gave him an office in the State Department, he probably discussed the topics which the "National Gazette" was to take up, and he probably read the proof of the articles which that paper was to publish. In his animosities the cloak of charity neither became him nor fitted him.
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